Leaping & Listening: Reflections of a Black Insights Consultant

Osman Jalloh, Consultant Behaviour & Culture, reflects on the art of working in the in-between, where culture shifts, contradictions meet, and new worlds take shape.

The Art of Seeing the Unseen. 

In an earlier piece, I wrote that lives lived in the margins – lives that exist off-centre – show that meaning is made there, too. The margins influence the internal, not the other way around. For strategists, queer theory matters. It invites us to sit with contradictions and to dwell in the gaps that reveal less familiar versions of life – the stories that often slip past the mainstream.

The Telling Power of Tension. 

As Black History Month comes to an end, I want us to linger with its meaning – and its complexity – rather than rushing to tidy it away. For me, this mindset is central to cultural insight work. We’re not simply marketing identity; we’re exploring how different personas and experiences of Black life make sense of the world. Sometimes that means sitting with the messy bits – the overlaps, the contradictions, the “in-betweens.” Insight begins when we stay with discomfort long enough to understand what it’s trying to show us.

The Language of Leaping. 

My connection to this way of thinking starts with me. My profile reads: “Osman is a Consultant in the Behaviour & Culture team, with a strong foundation in cultural studies and a deep passion for storytelling and global cultures.”The word consultant has two roots – one meaning “to be with,” the other “to leap.” That doubleness captures what good strategy does: staying close enough to understand, yet willing to step back and see differently. Leaping is movement, perspective, and a kind of creative bravery. It reminds us that consulting isn’t static – it’s about shifting angles to reveal new patterns and possibilities.

Leaping as Resistance. 

For Black people, the idea of leaping carries a deeper history. Scholar La Marr Jurelle Bruce writes about how, during the Middle Passage, leaping became an act of resistance – a final, defiant reclamation of humanity in a world that tried to erase it. And it is no accident that the Middle Passage bridged the “old world” and the “new world” – bringing forward a new era beyond imagination. When we leap, we create new worlds – literally. As Achille Mbembe reminds us in Necropolitics, “destroying one’s body does not affect the continuity of being.”. It’s a haunting truth that shows how Black life persists, reshapes, and bears in the face of unbearable.

From Leaping to Listening. 

That leap of persistence – Black life finding new ways to exist, adapt, and create – is a radical form of endurance. Listening too¸ became a powerful way for culture to resist, reimagine and rebuild. In the hauntingly real film of Get Out, we hear the “Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga” – ‘listen to your ancestors’ – albeit it in a low register. Later, the same root word, sulere, came to mean “to seek advice”.  That’s the essence of consulting – the quiet craft of helping others make meaning, trace connections, and move forward. To consult, then, is both to leap and to listen. Both are vital to understanding culture and helping brands connect to it more deeply – listening to the leaping and leaping to the low registers; where the new worlds are beginning to hum.

Consulting as Linking Worlds. 

Last week, I gave a talk with the Behaviour & Culture team at Truth Consulting: Black Abrahamics: Abrahamic Faith in Medieval Africa. It was inspired by my own name – Osman Jalloh – and by the African and Arabic histories that intersect far beyond what we often call “modernity.” At Truth, we often leap. We explore what’s familiar and what’s less familiar – the proximate and the distant – and find (or sometimes create) the connections between them. It makes sense, then, that we feature works that move between the Moors and the Mandem – a narrative arc of Blackness that affirms, as Ahmed might say, “the commitment that life does not need to follow a certain line to be meaningful.”

Towards Worlds Not Yet Inhabited.

Black life often creates “a world not yet inhabited” – a world that doesn’t orbit old norms or follow straight lines. That’s how I think about strategy, too: as a leap toward what’s emerging, what’s becoming, and what doesn’t quite fit... yet.